10th Amendment Quotes
The 10th Amendment was created to take care of this objection which Jefferson and many others had.
The 10th Amendment reserves powers to the states and limits the Federal Government’s powers. However, there are other clauses in the Constitution, like the Commerce Clause (Article I Section 8), which gives the Federal Government authority and control over Interstate Commerce, which in modern society permeates almost all activities of State government, The result is that the federal government / state government power division has been a political issue and not really a constitutional one. At the time Republicans advocated a literal 10th Amendment interpretation and the Democrats favored a stronger Federal Government with more authority and power as stated by the Commerce Clause. Roy had been trying to explain to his fellow Republican strategists that it is hard to attract Blacks to the remainder to the Republican Platform as long as they were insensitive to what the 10th Amendment meant to Blacks historically. The Southern states cited the 10th Amendment more than any other part of the constitution to justify their right to maintain slavery. It was the Federal Government that ended slavery. Under the rubric of the 10th Amendment the South managed to get rid of most of the racial civil rights Reconstruction reforms that were imposed by the Federal Government on the Southern States. And it was the 19th Amendment that was the authority for Segregation for 100 years. And the terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan and the lynching and terror imposed on Blacks by Southern states claiming the 10th Amendment right to do so. Finally, it was the Federal Government, overriding the 10th Amendment with the Commerce Clause and other parts of the Constitution that passed and enforced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Desegregation and the end to Lynching and other Southern State-Sponsored terrorism. Blacks will not any time soon accede to having the 10th Amendment literal view of the role of government and if Republicans insist on that there would continue to be very few Black Republicans,
The major issue was whether Congress and the Federal Government could make laws and regulate the communities of people who had settled in the new territories. The argument that Young made was that unless a power was specifically enumerated in the Constitution as being granted to the Federal Government it was not. Most Constitutional scholars believe that there were powers implied by the enumerated powers such as the right for the Federal Government to regulate child labor or the safety of nuclear power plants which of course were never mentioned in the Constitution. At the same time anti Mormon sentiment led many to extend Federal Regulation to Mormons that had not been extended to other people/ Plural marriage was one of those major value issues. The Mormons were very innovative in setting up institutions like buying cooperatives and systems for medical care and welfare, and many of these threatened the then established economic principles of many men of power and wealth. See {614870} for John Taylor’s similar view.
